Building the world's longest Tunnel

 

AlpTransit is a Swiss federal project aimed to build faster north-south rail links across the Swiss Alps by constructing base tunnels several hundred meters below the level of the current tunnels. With a planned length of 57 km, the Gotthard Base Tunnel will be the longest railway tunnel in the world upon completion (expected in 2017). On assignment for the German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, I visited the miners working on a 3000 tons heavy tunnel boring machine, far away of daylight...

 

 

Dance Yourself!

Since he came to Germany six years ago, Prince Ofori spends his afternoons in the nearby youth center Grenzallee on a noisy street in Berlin-Neukölln. The neighbourhood is known as a skid row with a high crime rate, drug addiction, high unemployment and social issues. Here, the twenty-year-old has founded the M.I.K. Fam, a small dance group of mainly Ghanaians with a strong sense of solidarity. Their speciality is Krump, a new hip-hop style characterized by free, expressive, and highly energetic moves...

 

 

 

From dusk till dawn

 

The fishermen of Baoût, a village of 400 in the Senegalese Saloum delta, work under extreme conditions to make their living: Up to twenty of them are cramped on tiny pirogue boats when they leave their village in the afternoon to catch Bonga shad or Ethmalosa herring out at sea, 50 miles away. The men, some merely 14 and skipping school, others fishing since several decades ago, will spend all night on the boat, without navigation devices, safety precautions or even torches, waiting for their net to fill up and then hauling it onto the pirogue by the sole force of their hands and bodies...

Maramureş – Europe’s forgotten edge

Less than two decades after the end of the communist era, Romania’s mission towards democracy and liberal markets has already reached its primary goal: Since January 2007, Romania is a full member of the European Union – its business centres are booming, and the Romanian economy catches up with its role models in Western Europe every month. But not everyhere within the new member state, modernization is going equally fast...

 

 

Mongolia in Transition

 

Since the 1990s, life even in the far-off steppes of Mongolia has been increasingly influenced by Western consumer goods. To be sure, modernization is gradual here - in the yurt, the new stereo remains discreetly in the background and outside, horses trot around the jeeps parked there as if they had always been there. But it is understandable that the small minority of nomads who remain ask themselves whether their austere lifestyle moving around with their livestock is worth it, when they compare the temptations of the city with dependence on nature...

Portraits